Custody: Are the Kids Alright?

If we want to blame someone for divorce, let’s blame the instigator and his or her attorney. I have a word of warning: The more you fight, the bigger the chance that the winner will be the attorney, who ultimately gets the money. The sad part about my recent divorce is that because of this ridiculous and long fight in court, we wasted a lot of money that could have been better spent on our kid’s needs. Money that could have been used for the kid’s education, or medical emergencies, or even to help the ex-spouse (especially if a stay-at-home parent) go back to school or rebuild a career, because that is what really makes sense. A divorce doesn’t have to be ugly and cut-throat on top of being a source of pain for everyone. Because this way everybody wins, especially the kids. The goal should be the well-being of the child, even if that means giving up on fighting for child custody. Your children know who loves them, and if you stay involved and keep on being a good parent, no court paper can take away your child’s love.
Name withheld by request

As an attorney who has practiced family law for twenty years, I agreed with the majority of Jeannine Ouellette’s article describing the marriage dissolution process in Minnesota [“Dealing From the Bottom,” September]. If our legislature had intentionally set out to create a system producing inequitable, shortsighted results inflicting the maximum degree of harm on children, it succeeded. Ouellette correctly noted that many dissolution statutes are the result of efforts by gender-based advocacy groups to advance their agenda with little thought to the children whose lives will be directly affected by the legislation. However, she perpetuated a troublesome stereotype by reprinting the claim of an unidentified attorney that while many fathers ask for joint physical custody of their children “only ten percent really want it” and, for most fathers, joint physical custody is simply a ploy to reduce child support. My experience is precisely the opposite. What most fathers object to is a legal system that ignores and devalues a father’s relationship with his children. The litigation system in our country uses an adversarial model—each side fights to “win.” This makes little sense when the custody of children is at stake. Assuming one parent should have “primary” custody of the children means the noncustodial parent’s status is diminished and rendered less meaningful. When a father sees his children on alternating weekends, he cannot function as a parent—he is more akin to an uncle. It is children who suffer as the result of this diminished role.
The Minnesota guidelines effectively assume the custodial parent has no economic responsibility for the child. This may be plausible for an unwed mother receiving public assistance but is dubious when a marriage ends. As a practical matter there is little difference in actual childcare costs between a custodial mother and noncustodial father. In this context the child support guidelines are simply a naked transfer of funds from one parent to another and have no relationship to the child’s actual needs.
Glenn P. Bruder
Edina